


Tell me we're dead and I'll love you even more

by Craftnarok



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Flint wasn't reunited with Thomas, M/M, Post-Series, Reunion, Some Angst with a Happy Ending, Treasure Island who?, and Silver remains 'Problematic', and the power of stoic philosophy, bed sharing, conversations in the dark, everything goes well until it doesn't, mentions of Flinthamiltons, mentions of silvermadi, unspoken truths - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-23 16:22:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14937761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Craftnarok/pseuds/Craftnarok
Summary: In the year 1725, or thereabouts, John Silver finds himself driven by a storm into an inconsequential little port town, barely a speck on any civilised map. Returned to the life of a drifter, tired and rough around the edges, he is resigned to waiting for the weather to pass before he can sail on again to the next town, and the next, and the next. That is until he overhears a conversation in the inn about a local fisherman, one Captain Barlow, and his tall tales of tempests and becalmings, devils and sharks, and Silver finds a new future opening up to him, haunted by the spectres of his past.Featuringartby Saskia (@finngualart) anda moodboardby Millie (@madisilverflint). Thank you both! <3





	1. Accept the things to which fate binds you

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: So we’re clear from the outset, Thomas is not in this fic. He is not alive. Flint was not reunited with him at the plantation. This is significant to the story. I started writing this just after S3 aired, which is why he was originally not in it, but what I finally worked out is a relatively canon-compliant post-series fic that, fittingly enough, executes the third option in interpreting the ending. It’s not ‘unproblematic’. 
> 
> SO, if any of the above is an issue for you, please do not read on. If you feel even remotely on the fence about whether you like and forgive John Silver for his bullshit, do not read on. This is a Silver-centric fic and there will be more bullshit from him, because that’s what he does. And I love him anyway. Madi is also not in this fic, partly because the issue of her relationship with Silver is a whole other complicated story that I still don’t know how to tackle head on. She is mentioned quite a lot though.
> 
> If you're cool with all of that though then I hope you enjoy it!

Fucking small towns. Fucking inclement weather. Fucking craven captains afraid of a little wind and rain, bolting for safe harbour at the drop of a hat. It was a divine fucking conspiracy to trap him in this place that stank of fish and horse shit and seaweed, and where the most scintillating conversation available was about the fucking harvest - bountiful crop of turnips this year, apparently, though the cabbages had struggled - and where every fucking person felt the need to openly fucking ogle his missing fucking leg. Not that Silver was becoming bitchy or irritable in his old age, but Jesus, what he wouldn’t give for a brief snatch of intelligent conversation. Two days he’d been confined to this inn, since the storm had driven the ship he had been passenger aboard into the harbour. The worst of the weather had passed, but the streets were still inches deep in a thick slurry of mud and shit, and he didn’t much fancy his chances of remaining upright if he tried to navigate his way through them for a turn about the town. He had tried asking the innkeeper if he had any books he might borrow, but the man had looked at him as though he might be a dangerous lunatic. He supposed, on reflection, his unkempt appearance didn’t exactly lend itself to the image of a literate man who would want to read books, rather than tear the pages out of them to line his sodden boot. He had picked up a month old newspaper from a chair by the fire the day before - a local rag - but he had read it from cover to cover three times since then, and so he found himself once again distractionless in his confinement.

He was sat at the bar nursing a pint of ale after his lunch, an uninspiring stew that was best not too closely examined, letting the noise of the other patrons’ conversations wash over him. He had colonised this particular stool soon after arrival at the inn and made it his own, tucked against the wall so that his crutch sat hidden in shadows and his loose trouser leg was out of sight. He had long ago perfected the art of pretending not to notice when people’s gazes inevitably wandered down to the space where his left foot ought to be, but the more tired or riled or bored he was the more difficult it became to ignore, and fucking hell was he bored right now. He felt that itching buzz beneath his skin that begged him to get up, to move, to do anything, but getting into an altercation with the next bumpkin to make the mistake of glancing down was a pisspoor solution to his frustration. He’d feel better for it, certainly, younger and stronger and as though he had some power over his own damn life, but it wasn’t worth being run out of town for that. And so he buried his face in his mug of too-weak ale, continued to work a groove into the bartop with his thumbnail, and eavesdropped on the table of men behind him.

“Well you know why that is don’t you, Ted? That Captain Barlow’s been telling the kids stories again. Had my Daisy petrified of the storm the other night he did, convinced that some sea monster was going snatch her from her bed.”

“What’s he been saying now?”

“Oh, the usual tall tales. According to Daisy, years ago Davy Jones himself drove him into a living tempest that almost swallowed him whole. Said that the sea reached out with waves a hundred foot high that thrashed his ship and ate half his crew alive, and when the storm spat him out the other side he spent months adrift, becalmed and starving, cursed by the Devil. He’s promised to tell them next time how he caught sharks bigger than shire horses to feed his famished crew, armed only with his bare hands, a dull blade, and the will to live. Absolute rubbish, but the kids believe every word out of his mouth.”

There was a strange buzzing in Silver’s ears and his mouth felt suddenly very dry. Frozen in place, mug raised to his lips, he swallowed against the bile rising in the back of his throat. It had been a very long time since he had heard that name or those stories. A lifetime, it felt like. When it had all finally gone to shit, when he had seen that there was no future ahead of them that carried with it anything resembling victory or life, he had been the one to cut the cord and run. As fast as his leg would carry him. Drowning men weren’t rational; given half a chance they would drag you under with them, without even realising they were doing it, and so after he had wept and raged and wept some more, he had made the decision for all of them. After everything he had lost, and everything he had almost lost, he just couldn’t stand to give any more to that fucking island or the ravenous cause. They had taken enough from him. He only wished there was a way to stop it from taking _him_ too, but he knew in his gut that Flint had been consumed by that place long before he had ever met him. He was already a ghost. Along with all the others. Along with the one he hadn’t found his voice to name. And yet-

“Perhaps you should go and talk to the Captain then. Tell him to lay off.”

“Ha! Not likely. He might just be some old sea dog but he gives me the creeps. There’s something about his eyes. It’s sinister, you know? He’s good to the kids, but I don’t like dealing with him myself.”

“Must be embarrassing to be more lily-livered than your own nine year old daughter, Frank.”

“Excuse me, friends,” Silver said, finally turning on his stool to face the table behind him where two of the men were laughing while one spluttered with indignation. “Pardon my intrusion, but I couldn’t help overhearing. You mentioned a Captain Barlow? He sounds rather like someone I used to know. You wouldn’t happen to know where I might find him?”

The man called Frank looked him up and down, disdain clear in his gaze, eyes settling too long on the frayed seam of his left trouser leg, and Silver had to quash the bristle of truculence that passed through him. He forced the bland and inoffensive smile to remain fixed on his face while he waited for a reply, listening intently over the thrumming pulse of his blood behind his eardrums. Finally, the man spoke.

“I don’t rightly know where he lives, but a few days a week you’ll find him selling his catch by the harbour,” he said. “Might be there today. He’s a prickly old fellow though. Doesn’t take kindly to questions, I’ll warn you.”

Silver smiled again, though he made no effort to extend the warmth to his eyes. “Many thanks,” he said, and he downed the rest of his ale in one long gulp, picked up his crutch, and left the bar for his room.

 

~*~*~*~

 

For a good two hours he lay on his bed staring at the ceiling, digesting his lunch and this new information alike. It could be a coincidence, he told himself. Barlow was hardly an uncommon name, and second hand ghost stories were unlikely to bear much resemblance to the truth. There was a good chance that all he would find at the shore would be disappointment. Or perhaps it would be relief. He couldn’t be sure. Silver had always found himself plagued by a peculiar mix of intense self-awareness and deliberate self-ignorance, and it made it difficult to predict his own reactions to stressful situations. He generally avoided feeling anything at all too intensely these days; a neat trick he had resurrected from his youth, though it did tend to leave one’s arsenal of coping strategies rather empty. ~~~~

The weight of everything that had happened, and everything else that had happened in the years since everything had happened, pushed up against the back of Silver’s eyes. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyelids until he saw bursts of light, willing the vivid images and the echoing voices away. There were too many unsaid things, too many ghosts creeping in at the edge of his consciousness, and his skin buzzed with the urgent need to run that had dominated so much of his life. But he couldn’t. His ship was still firmly anchored near the shore, with no plans to depart any time soon. And more importantly, he felt in his bones that unacknowledged certainty of a choice made before conscious decision could catch up and justify it.

Silver scrubbed his hand roughly through his hair and rolled onto his side, reaching for the ragged, out of date newspaper that lay on the floor by the bed. The best way to drown out the constant noise in his mind, he had found, was to fill it with other people’s words instead. He presumed that was why Flint had so often been attached to a book, when moments of silence caught up with them. Memories of Flint’s long fingers cradling worn leather spines rose to the forefront of Silver’s mind, soft at the edges and familiar, and he blew out a heavy sigh to displace them as he thumped gracelessly back against the lumpy pillow and lifted the paper above his head, opening it up for the fourth time in the space of twenty four hours.

There was little to recommend this particular publication; it consisted of inconsequential local news stories, poorly reported national news stories, and advertisements for labour, properties, and events. Still, he often held on to such papers until he had enough coin to send a small package of them back to Nassau, and from there on to the Maroon Island. Very occasionally, he had enough money to send small books or trinkets. They weren’t much, but they were little pieces of the wider world that he thought Madi would enjoy. Of course, she could procure such things via Nassau for herself, but the packages served more than one purpose: they let her know roughly where in the world he was; that, as of the date on the notes he included, he was still alive, rather than dead in a ditch somewhere; they offered information pertinent to her particular interests and businesses; and most importantly they served as proof that he hadn’t forgotten about her. He hoped that this last fact was never in doubt, even if everything else about him and about them had been, more than once, but it didn’t hurt to remind her. And if she didn’t want the reminders, he supposed they would make for particularly well-travelled kindling, so they would still serve some purpose.

Here and there he had added notes in pencil: a quip crammed between the lines, an insight inserted into a margin, and relevant notices circled or underlined. He didn’t often write letters. Paper was expensive, he told himself, and as he was generally never in one place for long enough to hear back from her, it felt self-important and absurd trying to fill pages with anecdotes and thoughts that he wasn’t sure she even really wanted. So the scrawlings sufficed, along with a personal word or two in the margins every once in a while. It passed the time and kept him occupied, and he could feel as though he was doing something of small worth for somebody other than himself.

The golden afternoon light spilling in through his window crept slowly up the wall while Silver perused the pages and his own notes, and as it touched the cobwebbed cornice he finally dragged himself upright and over to the basin of water on the battered dressing table. There was an autumnal chill in the air that raised goosebumps on his skin as he washed. He pressed his hips hard against the wood for balance, his muscles tense and shivery, and he contemplated himself in the tarnished mirror while he dried his skin and pulled his shirt back over his head. His beard was just on the wrong side of wild, his hair little better, and he wondered if he oughtn’t to trim them both with his knife, as he had no razor. Far worse though, he thought, to end up looking patchy or uneven than wild. Then he truly would look like a madman. He tugged on the coarse hairs on his chin, peppered these days with more than a little grey, and allowed himself to wonder what Flint might look like now. If it was him, which it likely wasn’t, but if it was, would he still have the beard? Would he have his hair back? Flint had a solid decade on him in years, he considered, tying a strip of leather around his thick curls at the nape of his neck and tucking an errant strand of silver behind his ear. Flint’s hair would probably have all but forgotten the rich auburn of its youth. Grey would suit him. It would make his eyes seem even brighter. Catching himself twisting the tips of his moustache into jaunty points, Silver sneered at his reflection, wiping his still damp hands harshly on his shirt and reaching for the rest of his clothes. Best leave as soon as possible before he tried tarting himself up with rouge or hair ribbons like some flirting girl.

 

~*~*~*~

 

 

~*~*~*~

 

The rain had ceased for long enough that the roads were less treacherous than he had feared, but a biting wind remained, whipping his hair up around his face and making his eyes water. He had wrapped himself up in an ugly woollen scarf he had ‘acquired’ from an inattentive street merchant three towns back, and it was helping a little, but the wind was reaching and nimble and it seemed to find its way to every bit of clothing that was worn too thin, or poorly mended, or ill-fitting. He shivered, breathing out long and slow as he tried to relax his muscles and unhunch his shoulders. Accepting the cold was the first step to acclimatising, he had found, though he had to wonder why he hadn’t just got on a boat heading south instead. Fuck the cold. Maybe he should try Spain on for size over winter. No, not Spain. He’d pissed off far too many Spaniards. Perhaps Portugal.

He was just wondering whether his very rusty Portuguese, consisting largely of half remembered children’s rhymes, could be considered in any way useful as he rounded the church and gained a clear line of sight to the harbour. He paused, drawing his coat tighter around himself and pushing his left hand deep into his pocket to warm his fingers for a moment. This had been rash. He might have spent two hours horizontally contemplating little else, but it was still rash. He wasn’t prepared for either outcome of this little expedition. Relief in the face of a stranger, or distress in the face of his captain. Or was it the other way round? He couldn’t quite keep it straight.

“Fuck,” he muttered, twisting to look over his shoulder. The inn was well out of sight by now, but heavy clouds tinged with purple were gathering overhead, pressing upon him to make up his goddamned mind, and quickly. Harangued by the fucking weather. This really was beginning to feel like a divine conspiracy.

“Fucking madness,” he decided, clasping his barely warmed fingers back round his crutch and continuing his journey down towards the harbour. 

The last hundred and fifty yards seemed to take an age to cross, and Silver’s stomach churned as the smell of the sea got stronger and he caught sight of several fishing boats dragged up onto the shingles and overturned. The air was thick with ozone and salt, heady and overwhelming, and looking around for any sign of ‘Captain Barlow’ Silver tried to keep his breathing even and calm. He felt sick. The fearsome Long John Silver, fighting to keep hold of his lunch at the mere idea of seeing his captain again. No-one would believe it. Well, poor bastard Billy certainly would’ve believed it. He snorted to himself. And then the bottom dropped out of his stomach altogether. There was a little boat a way down the beach, sat upright on the pebbles, and inside it sat a man with a very familiar profile, half obscured by windswept hair that wasn’t quite as grey as he had imagined. 

A shiver ran through Silver that had very little to do with the wind and he could feel the hairs on his arms standing on end. It was actually him. He really was here. What the hell kind of coincidence was this? The two of them washed up in the same place by the sea, like flotsam from a bygone age and a long lost ship. Silver had always detested the idea of fate - there was something obnoxious and entrapping about it - but this was testing the bounds of his stubborn disbelief. He wondered how long he could stare before Flint felt his eyes boring into him and looked up, or how close he could get before Flint recognised the sound of his thump-step-thump-step gait. He sincerely hoped Flint wouldn’t have a funny turn from the shock; he wasn’t exactly a spring chicken. It would be fairly typical of his luck of late to kill Flint by accident within seconds of finding him again.

“Fuck it,” he muttered, and he started forwards with no real plan of what to say when he got there. He wasn’t even sure he _wanted_ to speak to Flint, only now that he’d set eyes on him he knew he couldn’t turn back.

Perhaps the wind was loud in Flint’s ears, or perhaps he was just half deaf from a lifetime of cannon fire, but Silver managed to get alarmingly close before he finally looked up. Flint had always been such an open book to him, and he was relieved to find that that much had not changed. A thousand expressions crossed his face in the space of a second, and Silver saw them all. Flint’s eyes were wide and beneath the span of freckles that dusted his skin he had turned very pale. His hands stilled on the fish he had been in the process of gutting, and Silver thought he saw a tremor there. Or perhaps it was closer to a twitch, his fingers tightening convulsively around the handle of the small blade in his hand. It ought to have been frightening. Once upon a time it might have been, but too much had passed between them for Silver to be frightened of him now. Flint’s breathing quickened, as it always had when he was caught unawares, and his still-broad chest seemed to strain at the buttons of his coat.

“Hello, Captain. Long time no see,” Silver said finally.

Flint said nothing in return, frozen in place and staring. Silver took the chance to drink in the sight of him. His hair was longer than Silver had ever seen it, almost brushing his shoulders, and though shot through with more than a little grey, the red hadn’t left it altogether. His short beard was the same, and far neater than the wilderness Silver was sporting. His eyes however were unchanged, and there was a sense of unsettling deja vu when he looked into them. _He’s still handsome_ , his brain supplied unhelpfully.

The silence stretched on, but Silver found no more words forthcoming, and he began to fiddle with the handle of his crutch, looking down to the spot where his foot shifted restlessly on the uneven pebbles.

“Please say something,” he said finally, when he could no longer bear the oppressive uninterrupted white noise of the waves. 

“How did you find me?” Flint said. His voice was quiet, faintly hoarse, but more gentle and inquisitive than he had expected.

“By chance,” he said. “The storm drove my ship into the harbour. I’ve been staying at the inn. A man there was talking about a Captain Barlow and the stories he’d been telling. They sounded familiar.”

“Hm,” Flint replied ineloquently, finally putting the fish and the knife down and wiping his hands on a rag at his feet. “Is Madi here too?”

“No. It’s just me,” Silver said, hoping Flint wouldn’t press further.

Silver was beginning to feel ridiculous towering over him. He never towered over anyone and it was a fact that he had played to his advantage a great many times over the years. The gift of underestimation. He was far more skilled at looming from below. There was an odd feeling of vulnerability to having a higher centre of gravity to Flint in this moment, as though he might be knocked off balance when he least expected it. Thankfully, finally, Flint stood, and Silver’s eyes remembered that comfortable angle that they had become so acclimatised to all those years ago. 

“It’s going to rain,” Flint said, and Silver looked up at the threatening, heavy clouds that seemed to be barely clinging onto the sky above them. “I live not too far away, if you want to sit and have a drink.”

Silver turned to look back in the direction of the town again, and Flint seemed to know what he was thinking.

“I don’t go to the inn,” he said. “I mostly just keep to myself.”

Silver tapped the crutch against the pebbles as he considered, and then he nodded with a tut that betrayed his misgivings. “Alright,” he said.

Flint packed his things up and stowed the boat upside down high on the shore above the strandline, and they set off together towards the outskirts of the town.

 

~*~*~*~

 

‘Not too far away’ turned out to be a walk of some twenty minutes, and Silver was feeling quite grumpy within ten. He was sweaty under his scarf, though his ears had gone numb, his body was starting to ache, and it was beginning to rain. Flint was providing no conversation to distract him from his discomfort either, and it was giving him far too much time to wonder whether he’d made a terrible mistake.

“Here,” Flint murmured, just as Silver was about to spit something acerbic and embarrassingly breathless in his direction.

They were standing in front of a little stone cottage with small, deeply set windows, an overgrown garden, and a moss-covered slate roof upon which a dark red ivy was inching its way towards a squat chimney stack. It was strangely charming. A touch ragged around the edges, perhaps, and showing its age, but it felt distinctly homely and comforting. Above all it felt reassuring and solid and safe. Silver very deliberately didn’t think about how the house felt like an apt metaphor. Only a masochist would consider such a thought. It made for a good kind of pain though, like tonguing at a split lip or pressing on a bruise.

Flint strode ahead of him up the short path to open the door and Silver wasn’t sure what to expect once they got inside: the fastidious neatness of an ex-Navy man or the cluttered disarray of a man once long deprived of permanence and domesticity. As it turned out, he was correct on both counts. The house was certainly tidy, with a place for everything and everything in its place, but ‘everything’ was also rather a lot. He spied two bookcases from his spot just inside the door, both looking to be groaning under the weight of the tomes piled upon them, and far more crockery than one man alone could possibly have use for. For a horrible moment, the thought crossed Silver’s mind that perhaps Flint did not live here alone and he truly was intruding to an obscene degree on his hard won peace. But no. The only boots by the door were the ones Flint had just placed there, and only one teacup sat clean and upturned on the kitchen counter.

“You’re in or you’re out,” Flint said over his shoulder as he crouched down to set a fire. “It’s not a barn.”

Silver realised he was still standing with the door wide open behind him, the cold wind flooding the house as he looked around, and feeling a little chagrined at being addressed like a wayward child he shut the door with more force than was necessary. Now that he was here he truly felt off-kilter and unsure. All of his old tricks had come back to him since Nassau, conjoined with all the new ones he’d learnt there. He knew how to be persuasive and charming and affable, or funny or frightening or foolish, but he had almost forgotten how to simply be himself. And domesticity was a thing he had never had the chance to properly adjust to in the first place. Comforting and safe it might appear from the outside, but once he was let in it became overwhelming and stifling. Too aptly metaphorical by far.

“Can tell you’ve mostly been talking to kids,” Silver said, deflecting his discomfort as he made his way over to the nearest chair and draped his scarf across the back before sitting. “It’s a long time since I’ve been scolded for treating a house like a barn.”

“I can scold you for not taking your filthy boot off too, if you’d like,” Flint retorted, coming round the table to fetch a kettle to hang above the fire.

“Fuck off,” Silver grumbled, but he slipped the boot off anyway and threw it into the corner alongside Flint’s.

Trading barbs was a reintroduction Silver felt far more comfortable with, and he was happy to continue for as long as it would hold any more jagged or ugly feelings at bay. Whatever the hell this reunion was to be, heartfelt was not a part of his entirely unformed plan. He was perfectly content to go on feeling nothing more unsettling than mild curiosity or moderate unease for the rest of his life.

“You’re a liar, by the way,” he said, as Flint placed a pair of teacups on the table in front of him.

“Undoubtedly, but you’ll have to be more specific,” said Flint, finally sitting down on the chair between him and the fire.

“‘Sharks as big as shire horses’ according to that dullard at the inn. You know full well they were no bigger than ponies. Cattle, at a stretch,” he said.

Flint snorted. “The children were losing interest. It was either make the sharks bigger or invent a kraken, and they can tell when there’s not enough truth to the story,” he said.

“I suppose the truth is absurd enough anyway. It already sounds embellished,” Silver said.

“Mm,” Flint replied, and they fell back into a thick silence punctuated only by the now steady drumming of the rain outside and the rattle of the kettle as it slowly reached its boil.

While Flint set about making the tea, Silver stood wordlessly and moved across to the nearest bookcase. He could feel Flint’s eyes on his back, sense his irritation at the uninvited intrusion, but he pressed on regardless. Discomfiting someone else to soothe his own unease was one of his oldest and simplest tricks, and Flint had always been a prickly fruit ripe for the picking. He didn’t like how fucking _calm_ Flint seemed to be. After everything that had happened, after all this time, had he finally made himself into that goddamn rocky promontory that was entirely unmoved by Silver crashing unexpectedly back into his world? It felt strange. Silver had been the changeling, quick to roll with the punches and to make benefit out of chaos, hiding behind smiles and an easy manner. Not that Flint was unskilled at bending situations to his advantage or appearing unconcerned when it was called for, Silver supposed. Perhaps this was just who Captain Barlow was. Subdued and stoic and infuriatingly benign. He didn’t want to see Captain Barlow though, he wanted to see Flint.

“How does a humble fisherman afford so many books?” he asked, running his fingers across their spines.

“Miranda,” Flint said, suddenly very close behind him.

Silver jumped at Flint’s proximity, grabbing the nearest book to try to cover his surprise. Maybe they were both getting deaf in their old age. “Miranda?” he echoed, frowning in confusion as his brain finally caught up with what Flint had said.

“She had money set aside even before we left London, from Thomas. I knew that she could still access it from Nassau - she tried to buy a life in Boston with it once - so I thought...some forgery, a little bribery, and a bill of exchange saw most of it paid out to me once I had a semi-permanent address elsewhere.” Flint looked pleased with his own resourcefulness.

“And you used that money to buy a permanent address here and to fill it with books?” Silver said.

“Yes.”

“So all this is courtesy of-” Silver cleared his throat. The ghosts were closing in again.

“Is there something wrong with that?” Flint said, defensive.

“No. Nothing. Never mind,” Silver mumbled, running his thumb down the spine of the book still in his hands. ~~~~

Flint’s fingers were fidgeting awkwardly at his side, in that way that he’d had back in Nassau, and the deja vu sweeping over Silver was deeply unsettling.

“Will you come and sit? Before the tea gets stewed,” Flint said.

Silver scrubbed the back of his hand on his forehead, avoiding Flint’s eyes. He wasn’t sure what he was feeling exactly, but it was too much of something.

“Are we seriously just going to sit and drink tea like fucking high society ladies?” he said, looking over at the table and wrinkling his nose at the revoltingly delicate little teacups.

“What exactly would you prefer?” Flint replied, and ah, there was that familiar note of hardness. Finally.

“Something more medicinal,” Silver said, “to help me pull my shoulders down from round my ears before the tension sets my head throbbing.”

Flint sighed heavily. “I have some rum somewhere,” he said.

“Perfect.” Silver pushed past him, making his way back to the table and sitting heavily in the chair. He thumped the book down and finally read the title: La Galatea. Trust Flint to keep up with his Spanish long after he had any use for it. Silver wasn’t sure whether the fact made him fond or irritated. Possibly both.

Flint pulled a bottle out from a cupboard by the window, sniffed the contents, and brought it and a glass over to the table, placing them in front of Silver for him to deal with himself.

“Not had much good company recently?” Flint said archly, as he sat and poured himself some tea.

“Not a lot. Why?” said Silver, knowing full well he was taking some sort of bait.

“You’re being provocative,” Flint replied, just as Silver started to pour a generous helping of rum into his own flowery teacup, ignoring the glass completely. 

Silver narrowed his eyes at Flint as he raised the teacup to his lips, sipping delicately, but he couldn’t keep his eyebrow from quirking. Fuck, he’d missed this.

“Why are you here?” Flint said. It was blunt, and probably deservedly so given Silver’s current disposition, but it was still more inquisitive than hostile.

“You invited me,” Silver said.

Flint rubbed his thumb over the fine handle of his cup, peering into the depths of his tea as though it might hold an answer to the question he was considering without him having to ask it. Evidently it did not, because he said, “I mean why are you here and not with Madi?”

“Oh.” Silver looked away as Flint’s gaze rose to his face again. “It’s complicated. Well, not complicated exactly, but...” He trailed off, glancing back at Flint.

“So you and she aren’t-” Flint cut himself off, but he didn’t seem to be looking for the right word to finish his sentence. His meaning was plain enough without it.

“That part _is_ complicated,” Silver said.

“Is it? You either are or you aren’t, surely?” said Flint.

The obtuseness of the question rankled Silver, especially so given it came from Flint. “Were you and Mrs Barlow an ‘are’ or an ‘aren’t’? You know full well there are many states in between those two options,” he said.

“Fair point. That hardly narrows it down though,” Flint said.

“It wasn’t intended to,” Silver sniffed, but then he sighed and added, “We’re not nothing. We have far too much history to be that. But I couldn’t put a name to what we are. Does that narrow it down?”

“I suppose so.”

Flint caught his eye and Silver knew they were both thinking the same thing: it wasn’t only Silver’s relationship with Madi to which that statement could be applied.

“When did you leave the Maroon island?” Flint said, carefully moving the conversation on.

“This time around? About a year ago. No, maybe two? I’m not sure. Time tends to blur after a while. Two fucking cold winters, at least,” Silver said.

“What have you been doing?”

“This and that,” said Silver. “Cooking often, if you can believe it.”

Flint raised his eyebrows. “I can. Your cooking wasn’t that appalling once you’d learned a thing or two from Mr Randall.”

“Thank you?” said Silver.

“You’re welcome.”

Flint reached over to a chest of drawers and drew out a pipe and a leather pouch. Silver watched in silence as he packed the bowl with tobacco, lit a taper from the fire, and brought the pipe to life.

“When did you decide to give in to old age entirely and invest in a pipe?” he said, as furling tendrils of smoke plumed out from under Flint’s moustache.

“A while ago,” said Flint. “It’s relaxing. And it gives me something to do with my hands in the dark evenings when I’m too tired to read.”

“Maybe you should take up knitting to better occupy your hands in your dotage,” Silver said, valiantly sidestepping the innuendos about idle hands just begging to be made. He didn’t like the way the pipe kept drawing his gaze back to Flint’s lips. He couldn’t tell if it was deliberate or not.

“Who said I haven’t taken up knitting?” Flint said, twisting his long fingers round the pipe stem and blowing smoke through his nose. The smouldering glow of the tobacco was making his eyes glitter in an infuriatingly mischievous way.

“I suppose it can’t be that different to mending fishing nets,” Silver said.

“Wildly different, actually,” Flint said. “I have a spare pipe somewhere, if you’d like to occupy your own hands,” he added, eyes on the spot where Silver was once more unconsciously working his thumbnail into the tabletop.

At once a dozen faces sprang to the forefront of Silver’s mind: men and women from the maroon camp, some of whom he had grown to know well, a couple he might have even called friends; each of them escapees from tobacco plantations in Virginia or the Carolinas or other islands around the Caribbean. He smiled gently at Flint and wordlessly shook his head. It was, he knew, the most meaningless of virtuous abstentions, given the larger choices he had made, but even men like him had to draw their lines in the sand somewhere, and this little private hypocrisy was one of them.

“I have to admit, I’m surprised you remember his name,” said Silver, steering the conversation backwards.

“Whose name?” said Flint.

“Randall’s. I’m surprised you knew it in the first place, frankly,” said Silver

“He was my bosun for a time,” said Flint.

“I suppose so. Even still.”

Silver wasn’t sure whether he was doing Flint a disservice or not, but his surprise was genuine.

“And how many names do you remember, Mr Beloved Quartermaster?” said Flint.

“Too many,” Silver replied, more sombre than he had intended.

A heavy silence descended over them and Silver reached for the book on the table to drag himself out from under the weight of it. He could feel Flint’s eyes on him as he opened the cover and read the words ‘I’m sorry’ handwritten on the flyleaf.

“Who’s sorry?” he said.

“Me. It was an apology to Miranda for something or other,” said Flint. “I honestly couldn’t tell you for certain what it was about. It’s been such a long time. As you said, time does tend to blur together after a while.”

Silver frowned. “I don’t understand,” he said. “How did you get this?”

“It was in the chest of things you sent me from the house in Nassau.”

“In the what? What chest?” said Silver.

“The one that was waiting for me when I was released from the plantation. There was the letter from Madi, a little money, and a chest of things. I assumed you had a hand in procuring them,” said Flint.

Silver was silent. His memory was racing back through the years to a letter he sent to Savannah, and then further back before then to a moment when suddenly, and seemingly without reason, Madi had softened towards him again, just a little. One day on the cliff, like every other day he had sat there alone with his thoughts and his regrets and his certainties, she had appeared there too, stoic but decisive, as though she had reached some certainty of her own. And from then on she had opened the door just a crack and made enough room for him to earn some modicum of her forgiveness.

“When?” he asked Flint, a little breathless.

“When what?”

“When were you released?”

“Six months after I arrived, or thereabouts. You ought to know, you arranged it.”

“I arranged it after...much longer than that,” Silver said. He closed his eyes. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. It actually makes sense of a lot of things.”

“I don’t understand,” said Flint, gaze jumping around Silver’s face, searching for answers.

Silver looked up at the ceiling. There was a little patch of damp in the corner and he fixed his gaze on it. “Madi found you,” he said. “She freed you early and she sent you your things. And she arranged it all without telling me. Turnabout’s fair play, I suppose. I imagine she had help from Eme. Maybe the Governor’s wife too. You thought you and I could accomplish anything? Have you ever watched women working together to achieve something that’s contrary to the best laid schemes of men?” He felt quite proud.

“I still don’t understand. Why wouldn’t she tell you?” said Flint.

“I suppose she thought I’d never find out. And,” Silver paused, swallowing uncomfortably, “I told her a lie. It wasn’t malicious. It was meant to be kind, but on top of everything else...well. It was a mistake. I apologised, I told her the truth, but the damage was done. She thought the whole thing was a story. That you weren’t really there.”

“What lie did you tell her?” said Flint, curious.

Silver didn’t answer. He cast about for something else to say. “Fucking Oglethorpe. I sent my own letter later, as planned, and he replied telling me it was done then. He kept the money too, the thieving bastard.”

“Glass houses, Silver. He was probably counting his blessings you didn’t come in person.”

“Mm.”

Flint smiled softly, but it was melancholy. Silver thought there was a question on the tip of Flint’s tongue, his lips moving slightly as he weighed it, but if there was he didn’t voice it.

“Wait. I thought the house burnt to the ground,” Silver said.

“Just about,” said Flint, “but there was a cellar.”

Silver snorted. “Of course there fucking was. If we’re living in a world of wildly improbable truths, then why not that too?”

They fell back into a long silence, punctuated by the sounds of teacups on saucers, rain against the window, and Silver’s fingers flicking through the pages of _La Galatea._ It was a long time since he had tried to read Spanish and he was more annoyed than he would have admitted that it wasn’t coming easily. The added challenge did at least afford him the luxury of silencing the voice in his brain that had been whispering a litany of his most unforgivable sins against Flint since he had first heard the name Barlow.

As he squinted his eyes at a particularly impenetrable phrase, Flint got up and set about lighting candles against the deepening gloom. Silver turned to look out of the kitchen window, realising all of a sudden how fast the light was failing. The rain was as heavy as ever, but the darkness pressing in through the windows was definitely more to do with dusk than just the heavy pall of thunder clouds.

“Shit,” he muttered. “I should go before it’s pitch black.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Flint said. “You can’t walk back in that, you’ll make yourself ill. Or be struck by lightning. Like you said, you and I are far too overdue for a dose of divine punishment to go wandering about in storms. You’ll practically be begging for it.”

“You have direct correspondence with God now, do you?” Silver said, standing up and wrapping his scarf around his neck. “I suppose that’s a little better than actually thinking of yourself as a deity.”

“Those were always your delusions, not mine. Sit back down,” said Flint, following Silver to the door where he was pulling on his boot.

“You can’t order me around. You’re not my captain, Captain. I’m not staying the night. I’ll still be in town tomorrow, we can speak again then,” Silver said, foot already out onto the porch. “Goodnight.”

Flint’s heavy sigh was almost lost amidst the sound of the wind and rain, but Silver ignored it and moved to the front of the porch. The grey sheets of rain were so heavy that he could barely see the trees across the road. Fuck. The wind changed direction, driving fat wet droplets onto his face and he shivered violently. Still he pushed on, knowing it was stupid and stubborn and pointless, but he only made it as far as the lane before he stopped, his foot and his crutch both slipping around underneath him. So much time spent fighting gravity and waves on treacherous decks and he still couldn’t stay upright in the rain and the mud. Useless.

He made his way back to Flint’s garden wall and leaned against it gingerly, his boot sinking slightly into the mire. It was all wrong, he thought. This soft, gentle, inquisitive Flint, who he had only ever known in brief periods of calm between the various and multiplying states of chaos during his stint in Nassau. And he was apparently now made permanent. It felt as though they had been plucked from those cliffs or some dark, quiet night in the captain’s cabin and dropped unceremoniously into someone else’s life. There was a rising feeling of dread within him. A background hum of deja vu. This Flint who might forgive anything, who would accept a knife to his throat if it only meant Silver would stay. He could feel them hurtling towards another inevitable conversation that would knock everything sideways, and perhaps then Flint would shatter that calm facade and tear Silver’s throat out with his teeth. He might even deserve it. What would the ghosts say, he wondered.

Silver turned his face up towards the sky. He was soaked to the bone but he still wrinkled his nose as a particularly cold, fat drop of water trickled down his breastbone. He contemplated for a moment simply growing moss and becoming one with Flint’s garden wall. It would definitely solve a number of immediate problems for him. Of all the skills he had acquired over the span of his life, however, transmogrification was not among them. Unfortunately. He sighed loudly as he swiped a raindrop from where it was clinging to the end of his nose and prepared to suck up his pride and head back indoors. His knee creaked horribly when he carefully levered himself upright again; his bones were getting far too old for this sort of shit, and when had he ever had much pride anyway?

Turning round to head back in, he found the door still wide open, and through it he could see that Flint was piling clean, dry clothes on the chair he had vacated, pipe clenched between his teeth, expression unconcerned. Christ, he was a presumptuous arsehole.

“Shut up,” Silver said, kicking his boot back off as he shut the door behind him.

“I didn’t say a word,” Flint said. He didn’t even bother to look up from the food he was now busy laying out on the table as he held a dry cloth out in Silver’s direction.

Uncomfortably aware that he was standing in a growing puddle of rainwater and embarrassment, Silver took the cloth Flint handed him without word and pressed it to his face. This was the part of the dream where he ought to wake up in a cold sweat, surely? Perhaps that would come later. He surreptitiously counted his fingers, twitching them against the fabric, just to ground himself for the moment. Two sets of five, real and tangible and definitely not dreamt. Probably.

When he pulled the cloth away from his face he found Flint leaning against the table watching him curiously. He felt like a butterfly waiting to be pinned to a board. Or perhaps a ragged moth.

“I’m not changing with you hovering nearby,” Silver said, pulling the sodden leather tie out of his hair with difficulty and flinging it in the general direction of the table.

“Oh. Of course,” Flint said, pushing himself away from the table with a small jolt. 

It was difficult to tell in the low light, but Silver thought his ears might have gone red. Flint might have unconsciously slipped back into old habits, but Silver wasn’t about to do the same when it came to this. It wasn’t about pride or shame. It was about the fact that Silver wasn’t sure either of them were the same men who had once used to fuck in an age that was long since dead and buried.

He waited until Flint had gone upstairs and the sound of his footsteps had receded towards the back of the house before he began pulling his clothes off and dropping them to slap wetly against the stone floor. He pulled the newspaper from his coat pocket and surveyed the soggy mess in his hands. His handwritten notes on the front page were all but illegible, but he spread the pages out on the kitchen counter anyway, in case they could be salvaged once they had dried out a little.

He shivered again, his skin tight with goosebumps, and shuffled towards the fire to sit on the edge of the chair Flint had vacated. Running the now unpleasantly damp cloth over his skin, he found that almost against his will he was noting every bruise and scar and change that would be new to Flint. He had no intention of letting Flint see them, and yet. There were even a few tattoos here and there; some rash impulses to mar himself in some sentimental way, to make the outside match the inside. As though the leg wasn’t enough to mark him out.

As he pulled the too-large white shirt over his head he suddenly wondered what new things might be hiding under Flint’s clothes, but he shook the thought away with a forcefully whispered _“Jesus fuck”_ as he roughly pulled the pair of breeches on. Damn Flint and his breeches. He never could look like a common sailor and choose trousers. Silver didn’t bother to tuck the shirt in; at least the ridiculous length of it had the virtue of hiding exactly how precariously low on his hips the breeches sat, even with the hem rolled over twice. Flint had always been broader than him, and he was clearly doing just fine on his diet of bread and fish.

His hair still dripping gently, Silver hoisted himself back into his original chair, leaning his crutch near the fire to dry out, and poured himself another rum. Flint reappeared on the stairs a minute later, tentative, his arms full of thick blankets.

“Are you warm enough?” he said.

Silver bit back an irritable ‘yes, mother hen’, and simply said, “I’m fine.”

Flint lay a folded blanket over the chair closest to him anyway.

“I don’t think you’ve had much good company recently either,” Silver said, pulling a plate of bread closer and tearing off a piece. He ignored the blanket.

“Why’s that?” said Flint.

“Because you’re being patient and coddling in a way that’s slightly unnerving,” he said, and he held Flint’s gaze as he picked up Silver’s wet clothes from the floor and began draping them over a rack near the fire.

Flint just shrugged and sucked on his pipe. A thick lock of hair fell in front of his face as he bent over the drying rack, and Silver dragged his gaze away as Flint tucked it back behind his ear. The shaved head would have been easier to deal with. He felt so conflicted. He was happy and frustrated and excited and scared and he wasn’t sure what to do with any of those feelings. He never had been, really.

“You should get a dog. It’d suit you,” he said, a little too loudly.

“I had a dog for a while,” Flint said, finally sitting again. “It did suit me. I even took her out on the boat sometimes, when the weather was good. She was a loyal companion. But she ran off into the woods after a hare last spring and that was the last I saw of her. I couldn’t bring myself to get another.”

Silver tried not to laugh. He tried so very hard. He nodded sympathetically, he sipped his drink contemplatively, but as the words “I’m sorry” left his mouth, his cheeks creased and he couldn’t contain it. Maybe he could blame it on the rum and the stress. Or maybe he could just blame it on being a bit of a cunt.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Flint said.

Having succeeded at turning his laugh into a cough, Silver leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling, willing away the tears in his eyes.

“I’m sorry. I am, truly. It’s just, have you considered abandoning all pretense and becoming an ornamental hermit? Because it sounds like companionship really isn’t for you,” he said.

“That is astonishingly rich, coming from you,” said Flint. “Christ, I’d forgotten what an irritating little shit you are. Why don’t you piss off and be someone’s ornamental hermit? It’s about all you’re good for.”

A warm tendril of satisfaction unfurled somewhere beneath Silver’s ribs at having got a rise out of him, and he laughed again. “Gladly. We can both be ornamental hermits together,” he said.

“That’s not how hermits work,” Flint muttered.

“Well you would know.”

“Will you shut up and eat?”

 

~*~*~*~


	2. and love the people with whom fate brings you together

They passed a long while in companionable silence, eating and drinking together. Flint helped himself to some rum while he all but forced Silver to drink some water: _“I’m not dealing with your shit mood if you wake up sick as a dog tomorrow.”_ Silver suppressed more laughter at the word ‘dog’, in what he privately considered to be an heroic effort.

When they’d both eaten their fill, Flint lit his pipe again, leaned back in his chair, and said, “Will you tell me about some of your escapades?”

Silver raised an eyebrow. “Who said there were escapades?”

“It’s you. There were bound to be escapades,” said Flint.

“You wound me. Starved of drama, are you?” said Silver.

“You could say that.”

“You told me once that peace and quiet was what you wanted,” said Silver.

“I did and I do. But I can still enjoy stories,” said Flint.

“You’ve missed it, haven’t you? Parts of it. Just a little bit,” said Silver, some deep part of him intensely pleased by the fact.

Flint simply sucked on his pipe - a new gesture that Silver could grow very fond of - but he didn’t look away and that familiar spark was in his eyes.

“Me too,” said Silver.

He rolled his absurdly long borrowed shirt sleeves up above his elbows as he considered which story to tell, but paused when Flint spoke again.

“What’s that?” he said, gesturing at the inside of Silver’s right arm.

“Oh. It’s a tattoo,” Silver said, turning the sleeves down a little again. He hadn’t meant to show it.

“I can see that. I meant what is it a tattoo of?” said Flint.

“An octopus.”

“Why an octopus?” asked Flint.

Silver sighed. “I thought you wanted an anecdote about an escapade,” he said.

“Tell me about that instead,” said Flint with genuine interest.

“Nosy. If you must know, it reminds me of Muldoon. He had one just like it,” Silver said.

Flint frowned, clearly turning the name over and over in his mind, and a flicker of anger rose up in Silver as he realised that he would have to elaborate to enable Flint to put a face to the name.

“Gunner,” he said. “A Walrus man far longer than I was. Small, bald, bearded. I gave him the shits with that pig in the early days.”

“Christ, I’d forgotten about the pig,” Flint said. “Yes, I remember him.”

“Mm. He hated me. Then he liked me. Then I think he loved me,” Silver said, catching Flint’s eye.

“He…oh.”

Flint looked down at his hands, and if Silver had blindsided him with a long dead truth then he supposed it was a perfect opportunity to test the waters a little by elaborating further. Their shared burden of dead men was an unholy weight.

“He loved Logan first and longest, but then. Well. And you were dividing your time between trying to get yourself killed and loathing me, so he and I gravitated towards one another,” Silver said.

“So you and he…” Flint trailed off.

“Briefly.”

“You never told me about that back then,” said Flint.

“It wasn’t relevant,” said Silver.

“Is it relevant now?”

“No. But you asked and it breathes a bit of life back into his lungs saying his name to someone who might remember him. You should remember him.”

Silver leaned forwards to pour more rum into Flint’s cup and then his own, though they’d both had plenty enough.

“It’s almost perverse but I get nostalgic sometimes about those days, and one of those times happened to coincide with meeting a man with a steady hand and handy ink, so.” He shrugged. 

Flint sipped his rum with a grimace that said everything about the number of years separating him from their life of piratical degeneracy. “I never took you for the sentimental sort,” he said, suppressing a cough.

“I thought you’d learnt fairly conclusively that that was a mistake. Easy to make, but a mistake nonetheless,” Silver said quietly.

Flint’s cheek twitched. He opened his mouth, reconsidered and closed it again, and then said, “I don’t remember him having an octopus tattoo. I remember others, but not that.”

“Yes, well, I assume you never saw him naked, so that’ll be why.”

“Oh. Do you have others?” Flint asked.

“Yes.” He didn’t elaborate further.

“Somehow I didn’t take you for that kind of person either. Did I actually know you at all?”

Flint said it with humour, but Silver felt the weight of the question.

“You knew me,” he said. “But whoever I was then, I’ve been several other people since, _Mr Barlow_ , and some of them were that kind of person.”

They slipped back into silence, the crackle of the fire and the distant ticking of a clock filling the space between them. Silver was sliding lower and lower in his chair, warmth and a full belly offering more comfort than he’d known in a long while. To say nothing of the company. The chair itself was fast becoming uncomfortable, however, and Flint must have noticed Silver wince as he fidgeted slightly against the unforgiving wood.

“Are you ready to retire for the night?” he said.

“I think so,” Silver replied. “Where am I sleeping?”

“Upstairs. There’s only the one bed,” Flint said.

“Oh you do surprise me,” said Silver. “I can sleep down here. I’ve slept in more uncomfortable places. Just leave me a blanket.”

“Don’t be absurd. There’s enough room in the bed for two,” Flint said, frowning as he stood up.

Silver’s stomach swooped a little at the prospect.  When exactly had Flint privately decided to share his bed with him? Did he have some kind of plan?

“You’ll have plenty of room then,” Silver said, looking at his hands.

“John.”

“We’re on first name terms now, are we?” he said.

“Do you have to make everything so fucking difficult?” said Flint.

A little rich, Silver thought. “I generally feel compelled to try.”

Flint just stood looking at him, some of that old steel creeping into his gaze, and Silver could’ve sworn he felt the pitch of the Walrus’ deck beneath him.

“Alright, fine. Jesus,” he relented. He might be in the mood for a fight, but truth be told the ache in his back was the more compelling motivator in that moment.

Flint gathered up the blankets and headed for the staircase, and Silver felt an absurd rush of gratitude that he didn’t offer to help him upstairs. Not that he thought Flint ever would treat him like an invalid, but others had. Others did every damn day. He had almost forgotten just how easy it could be with Flint, in some respects. How they could understand each other on a fundamental level with barely a word exchanged. But when they did speak, my god, it was like cracking open a book and finding a portrait of your own soul inked on the pages within. How rare a thing was that? To be so understood. Yet it did require opening up, and there were important pages he hadn’t yet shared. Best to do so while he still had his feet on the ground.

“Flint,” he called out.

Flint paused halfway up the staircase and turned.

“What I told Madi. The lie,” Silver said, forcing himself to say that specific word. He took a deep breath before he pushed on. “I told her that he was at the plantation. I said I’d found a way to return him to you. To make you McGraw again.”

“He?”

“Thomas.”

Breathing life into the lungs of dead men was a dangerous thing. Silver thought Flint pitched forward a little at the sound of his name, as though struck a blow, but he recovered quickly, his brow knitted and his hands twisting gently in the material of the blankets. He stood silent and still for a moment, and then slowly he nodded.

“Alright,” he said.

“Alright?” Silver echoed.

“I knew you’d have to construct some story. I said as much to you then, on the island. You remember?” Flint’s tone was soft, inscrutable.

Silver suppressed a shiver as the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. The memories of those days on Skeleton Island were buried in a locked chest somewhere deep in his gut. To have one specific detail so casually laid out before him was confronting in a way he didn’t exactly appreciate, but he was in no position to complain.

“I remember,” he said.

“Well then, it’s no surprise really. I suppose I did know you after all.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

Silver sat unmoving, waiting for Flint to speak again, but he said nothing. Just as Silver opened his own mouth, not sure of what he was going to say but assuming something would fall out of it as it usually did, Flint turned and carried on up the stairs.

“You coming?” he threw over his shoulder. “Bring a candle.”

Silver snapped his mouth shut, considered his still wet clothes and the rain hammering against the window and, seeing no other sensible way forward, he reached for his crutch and a candle and followed Flint upstairs.

 

~*~*~*~

 

The bedroom could most generously be described as ‘cosy’; the bed itself took up most of the space, with a small bedside table and a chair occupying a large portion of the remaining room. Silver loitered in the doorway, intensely aware that Flint was still fully clothed and not wanting to find himself with his back pressed up against the wall trying to avoid brushing arms as he changed. There was a rickety grandfather clock just outside the bedroom door that looked as though it must’ve come with the house. Silver thought it was probably only still standing upright by virtue of being jammed into a corner, and yet it was still ticking, the insistent, resonant thunk of the pendulum belying the obvious age of the casing. Goddamn metaphors. Silver’s snort was thankfully drowned out by the sound of Flint pulling the bedroom curtains closed. He didn’t particularly want to explain his half-baked and rapidly expanding metaphorical house analogy to Flint. He could only admit to so much sentimentality in one evening.

“Are you a horseshoe?” Flint said.

“What?” Silver frowned, confused.

“It’s just, you seem to have taken to hanging in doorways,” said Flint, plucking the candle from Silver’s hand and carrying it over to the bedside table.

“Witty.”

“Thank you. Come in,” said Flint.

Silver remained where he was. “A horseshoe with its legs pointing down is bad luck though. Can you afford to invite that kind of misfortune in?”

“Either way up keeps the devil out, so they say. Come in. I won’t ask again,” said Flint.

“Are you sure about that?” Silver said. He didn’t specify to which part of Flint’s statement he was referring. He wasn’t entirely certain himself.

Flint simply shrugged, beginning to unbutton his waistcoat, and Silver felt a frisson at the stalemate between them. He watched silently as Flint stripped down to his shirt and underclothes and climbed into the bed. He rearranged the candle, then the blankets, then he lay down with his back to Silver, but it only took a few seconds more before he sighed loudly and rolled over again.

“Get in here. Please.”

Silver was content to have won his little game, but his heart still fluttered as he crossed the threshold into the room and sat on the edge of the bed. It had been a long, long time, and he felt so self-conscious he might as well be naked.

“Will you blow out the candle?” he said, barely glancing at Flint over his shoulder.

“If you like.”

Lying side by side in the dark it was so quiet that Silver could hear Flint swallowing; hear the little hitches in his breath as he considered speaking and then hesitated; hear the rickety grandfather clock ticking on the landing. He wanted to get up and stop its pendulum; tear it out and fling it through a window into the night, perhaps, for some added panache. The droning tick-tock was making him anxious. He felt as though he had run out of time long ago. Both of them were men out of their rightful time. What place was there for washed up pirate kings in the world anymore? And yet the fucking clocks just kept on ticking, reminding them that they were still alive, unnaturally, still breathing, somehow, and every moment getting further away from the wide open dreams of youth or the possibility of a life well lived. Though, he supposed, opinions might vary in that regard. Nobody could say he hadn’t crammed a lot of living into his life, not that that had ever been his goal. He had all the aches and pains of a body dragged through hell and back to prove it, and some days they felt like a punishment well deserved. Well, some of them. The tender bruises and the fragile pieces of his broken heart, perhaps, bound up tightly and tucked away somewhere safe. Those were things one could feel romantically tragic about, if one felt so inclined. But there were some hurts that ran so deep that one day he might just fight God himself over their injustice, should the opportunity arise. He wasn’t holding his breath though.

Once upon a time there had been nothing left to lose, and the ascetic satisfaction of cutting his cares to the quick had been its own sort of comfort. His concerns started and ended within the span of his skin, and it was easy to keep hold of the edges. Until it wasn’t. When his leg opened up, the edges of him had seeped out into a crew, a captain, and a wife. Almost a wife. He wondered for the thousandth time what their children might have looked like. The images came to him whether he wanted them or not, the brood of dark skinned, curly haired, laughing, happy children that he would have doted upon as nobody had ever doted upon him. Sometimes the image of them was a comfort, and he doted on them in his mind, but in that moment he did not want to see them, and particularly not wrapped in the warm embrace of freckled arms that made them gifts and read them stories. That future had never been within his grasp though. Had it? Sharp details of her face cut through his imaginings, things already dulled somewhat by distance and time, but dredged up into exquisite clarity by Flint’s presence. The little chicken pox scar on her forehead. The soft curve of her ears that he so loved to touch. It hurt and it made him angry and he wondered briefly whether killing Flint would help. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d killed a man to escape a situation he couldn’t talk himself out of. It might not even be the last. But he could never do it, not to Flint. He had proven that rather definitively. Perhaps in the morning he’d think about punching him and then see how he felt. Flint had always looked best with blood on his teeth. They both had. At the very least, it might drag a response out of him that more closely resembled the passionate temper Silver had danced his way around when they first met. Maybe he’d punch him and then fuck him and then think about killing him, just to see what he would do. Now that was something resembling a plan.

Flint breathed in deeply next to him and Silver held his own breath waiting for him to finally break the silence.

“Why did you tell Madi what you told her? Why would you think she would believe that?” Flint’s voice was carefully even, and Silver knew the things his mind must be turning over. Always too perceptive, when it came to him.

“I heard rumours,” Silver said quietly. “When I first learnt of that place, I heard-I was told that wealthy London families made use of it to have troublesome relatives...sequestered away. I sent a man there to investigate.”

“What did he find?”

Nausea rose up in Silver’s throat and he swallowed hard. His tongue was lead. His mind scrambled for words. “The cold truth. That I’d been a fool to hope.”

“Why not just tell her the truth?” said Flint.

“Because I was lying to myself too. After all the shit, all the suffering, everything that happened, _everything we did,_ I wanted to believe that something good had happened. That in the end there was some kind of resolution. A full stop to the story. And I almost started to believe it. Terror, exhaustion, and a vivid imagination are a powerful combination,” Silver said.

“A chronic issue of yours, if memory serves me rightly,” said Flint.

Silver’s mouth twitched in the direction of a smile. “I suppose it wasn’t such a reach, compared to imagining your captain could bend reality to his will,” he said. “But Madi was never a fantasist in that way.”

“No, she wasn’t,” said Flint.

Silver remembered they way they had understood one another too, reading from a different book than the one he and Flint shared, written in a language he could never hope to learn. That knowledge was its own kind of haunting. _‘They didn’t know him like you do.’_

“She always knew, I think. It ate away at us until I had to tell her the truth and then everything crumbled. And it didn’t matter that the lie was built on a true foundation; once she knew for certain, she doubted it all. I suppose that’s why she tracked you down. She thought I was lying about that too. I think that’s why things got better again, for a time, once she knew where the lie ended and the truth began. And when she knew a truth about you that I didn’t: that you were free.”

He could feel Flint nodding slightly, but the space between them was heavy with unasked questions. The weight of the final truth Silver still couldn’t name pressed down on him.

“How long would you have kept me there?” Flint said after a moment, his voice low.

Silver’s stomach roiled unpleasantly. “Two years,” he breathed. “I thought-I hoped it was enough for people to grow comfortable with the peace.”

Flint was still and silent, and Silver’s chest tightened with a horrible mixture of defensiveness and shame.

“You burned cities,” he said. “You killed women and children and-” 

“And you were innocent?” Flint cut across him. ~~~~

“I didn’t say that. By rights we both deserved the noose for some of the things we did and you know it. I’m not asking you to see what I did as a kindness - God knows I know it’s not that simple - but I am still asking you to see the scale of the suffering we wrought.”

“I believed it was a price worth paying. The lesser of two evils,” Flint said.

“I disagree.”

“I know that. If I know nothing else in this life, I know that,” Flint said, then he paused and added, “I always saw it, the suffering. I saw it, I just couldn’t allow myself to _see_ it. Does that make sense?”

“No,” Silver said, but as another silence stretched out between them, he conceded, “...yes.”

“If you live long enough with your eyes on the future, you blinker yourself to the present. Live too long solely in the present and you find you’re never prepared for the future,” Flint said.

“Are you a second rate philosopher now?” said Silver.

“I was always a second rate philosopher,” said Flint, his voice soft.

Silver was tempted to marvel at it, Flint’s newfound calm and perspective. He thought again of the way Flint had been towards the end of the war, so open with him, so desperate to trust and to forgive. That frisson of fear and confusion was still disquieting him. So many years, and yet perhaps they hadn’t changed that much at all. It was at once a comfort and a terrifying sword of Damocles.

“Why don’t you hate me?” he said, the words escaping him almost unbidden. “I half expected a knife at my throat before I could even open my mouth. I think maybe a part of me wanted that, for what I did.”

“I have a knife under the bed if you’re feeling nostalgic,” Flint said.

“Captain.”

Flint sighed. ”I’m just not. I was. I was angry for a long time, but the energy it took to maintain it, when there was nothing to be done to change what had happened. I’ve been angry most of my life, over one thing and then the next. I’ve run out of anger. At a certain point one simply has to accept that that fire has been extinguished, forcibly or otherwise, and seek a new path.”

Silver remained unconvinced, despite the evidence breathing softly next to him. “But how do you just put a stopper back in that bottle after so long?” he said.

 _“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment,”_ Flint recited evenly.

“Pardon?”

“Marcus Aurelius,” said Flint.

“Oh.” Fuck, he had become the rocky promontory after all, Silver thought. “Do you really believe that?” he said.

Flint huffed a small laugh. “It varies from moment to moment,” he said.

Silver could almost hear his smile. He could feel the heat of Flint’s hand next to his, and he pulled his fingers away from it gently. In the dark they had no form, no boundaries, no barriers. That was how they could bare their souls to one another, with their sharp edges shrouded. If Flint touched him then Silver would feel his outline again and he would be dropped back inside his body once more, the impenetrable walls of their skin between them, and he couldn’t bear it. There was freedom in the dark indeed, but illumination must be its end.

It was his favourite time, this weightless, formless, disorientating dark. It always had been. But it was a long while since he had shared it with someone else. He wondered, suddenly, whether it was the same for Flint, and he wondered what such a question would sound like in the dark. So he asked it.

“Have you been with anyone, since?”

“’Since’?” said Flint.

“Since. I don’t know. Since Nassau,” Silver said.

“You mean since you?”

Flint sounded…Silver didn’t know how he sounded. Inquisitive? Probing? Like he was asking more than one thing at once. Silver hummed in response, not quite trusting his voice.

“No. Not really,” Flint said, after a pause.

“What, nobody?” said Silver.

“No. Why, how many people have you…?” Flint trailed off.

“It depends on how you want to define them, I suppose. A couple who meant more than nothing, and a few who meant less,” Silver said.

“Does Madi know?”

“Yes, she knows.”

“It sounds lonely,” said Flint.

“Lonelier than being alone? It was enough,” said Silver, and he almost believed it.

“Was it?” asked Flint.

“Don’t ask that. You’re trying to pry my head open. What does it matter now anyway?” Silver said, and he felt the need to push back harder. “Who’d have thought it though, all this time and you’ve had money while I’ve had people. Funny how priorities change.”

“It was never about priority,” Flint said. “I just…couldn’t bear to inflict myself on anyone else.”

“Noble.”

“Don’t. You never thought the same? Even after what happened with Madi? And me? What happened, what you di-” Flint cut himself off, but his meaning was plain enough.

Silver breathed in deeply and chanced opening his eyes. The pitch black of the room pressed against them, only slightly more presence than absence. Flint’s words cut deeper than he would ever have admitted. Truth was always the sharpest blade.

“Fuck you,” he whispered.

He felt the sheets move beside his hand, and he slid back into his form, skin tingling, as Flint’s fingers touched his, soft and tentative. The world didn’t owe cruel men kindness, but perhaps that left them free to seek it in one another.

There were so many lives he could have led, and one by one they had all been lost to him. He wasn’t blinkered enough that he couldn’t see the marks of his own hand in the route his life had taken, but an aching sore of bitterness had been festering for years at the idea that, in the end, the lives he had lost had been taken by his association with Flint. Perhaps that was the true nature of Flint’s curse; the destruction of a hundred thousand lives unlived. He thought again of Muldoon. Muldoon who had held his hand as Howell sawed through his leg, while Flint levelled Charlestown to a charnel ruin; Muldoon who had panted into his mouth, stifling the murmur of Logan’s name against his lips the first time they fucked; Muldoon who had drowned in agony in that tempest that Flint now saw as a story fit for children. The living, breathing, dying truth of it all was a horror that he would never be able to escape.

And yet. The things he had shared with Flint were beyond what most people could imagine. If all of those possible lives with two whole legs, or a comfortable fortune, or even just a family with the woman he loved, were the price to pay for having known Flint at all, for having followed him into hell itself, then perhaps it was worth it. That thought was the one that made him angriest of all, when he dwelt on it. The things he had lost were beyond measure, but somehow he knew that if he had the chance to do it all over again, he wouldn’t do any of it differently if it meant losing that precious time they had spent so close to one another that even daylight couldn’t slip between them. Such was the power Flint still had over him. It wasn’t reasonable or logical or natural, and yet it was.

“James,” he whispered.

Flint’s fingers wound between his. The name had slipped out without him meaning to use it, but who was this man to him now if not just James? He wasn’t truly Flint, he hadn’t been McGraw for a lifetime, and Barlow didn’t suit him. So it was nothing or Captain or James. Perhaps he was only James in the dark.

“Mm?”

“I-” Silver’s voice caught in his throat. There was more to say. So much more. One more terrible thing. But Flint’s skin was warm and calloused and his thumb was moving gently against the back of Silver’s hand.

“I’m sorry,” he managed. “For all of it.”

Flint rolled onto his side, rearranging their hands between them. “I know,” he murmured.

Silver held his breath as Flint’s free hand lifted to his face, fingertips barely grazing his skin as he stroked Silver’s hair behind his ear. It was thick and frizzy and still a little damp from the rain, and it escaped from where Flint had tucked it almost immediately. Flint’s breath was on his face. Silver licked his lips and opened his mouth to speak again. And then he jumped slightly as Flint’s lips touched his and he found his mouth blessedly occupied.

It felt like a homecoming of sorts. The familiar heat of Flint’s mouth, the way Silver slid his tongue into Flint’s mouth first, the way Flint’s hand sank into Silver’s hair and his fingernails gently scratched his scalp. Silver’s body took a moment to catch up with what was happening; for a few seconds his head remained at an uncomfortable angle, twisted to the side as he lay flat on his back. But as Flint’s fingers squeezed the back of his neck, Silver’s body woke up and he untangled their fingers and grasped at Flint’s shirt with both hands to roll himself over and pull them close together. The heat of Flint’s body against his own was a paradise too long lost.

Silver’s nonchalance about the hollowness of his few liaisons across the years, about the depths of his loneliness, evaporated in an instant as his skin lit up under Flint’s touch. He was on fire, every hair on his body standing on end. He squeezed his eyes shut and sighed into Flint’s mouth, sinking his hand into Flint’s hair and finding the long strands that slipped between his fingers softer than he ever could have imagined. He felt poised on a precipice, the relief of being touched, of being wanted, of being alive, drawing him towards a crumbling cliff edge, begging him to throw caution to the wind and jump. Or perhaps he was already falling.

 

 

Suddenly, Flint pulled away from him, rolling towards the side of the bed and reaching for something. Silver froze. Could Flint taste the bitter emptiness in him? Could he feel monstrous serpent’s scales in place of skin? But then a spark, and the candle softly crackled back to life.

“I need to be able to see you,” Flint murmured. “Otherwise it feels like a dream. Like you might blow away at any moment.”

Silver peered at his face. Perhaps it was just an artifact of the flickering shadows cast by the flame, but he thought Flint’s eyes looked haunted. He wondered then what visceral visions and violences came to Flint at night, as they sometimes came to him. The allusions to horrors, real and imagined, and the longings so intense that he woke to sweat pooling on his breastbone, and a thick fog through which he had to fumble his way back to the present alone. Of course Flint had nightmares too. And of course some of them wore his face, and spoke with his voice, and kissed with his tongue.

He reached out and stroked the back of one finger across Flint’s cheek, his fingertip brushing Flint’s eyelashes as his eyes closed.

“I’m here,” Silver said.

He pushed against Flint’s shoulder, turning him onto his back, and dragging the blankets up over his own shoulders he crawled on top of him, gently laying the weight of his body on him. It was warm in their little shared cocoon. Flint’s hands rose to his hair again, gathering it up from where it fell around his face and bunching it at the nape of his neck.

“Tell me something only you know,” Flint said, sliding his legs apart so that Silver settled further between them.

Silver’s heart skipped a beat, and he looked over at the candle, letting the bright light sear his eyes for a moment before he blinked hard, eyes watering. When he looked back at Flint there was a shadowy green echo of the flame obstructing his vision. Somehow it made it easier to bear looking at him this close.

“I’ll show you something instead,” he said.

He sat up, straddling Flint’s hips, careful with the stump that still gave him aches and odd sensations even after a decade of healing. Flint’s hands fell to his thighs, long fingers sliding down the length of them, warm through the fabric of his breeches. Pulling his shirt up over his head, Silver tossed it off the bed and swept his hair over his shoulder, uncovering the sun and crescent moon wrapped around each other, tattooed over his heart.

“More sentimentality that I’d never own to in the light of day,” he said, keeping still as Flint leaned up to look at it more closely, fingers trailing over his skin. “The world in balance. Isn’t that what you said once?”

“Who’s who?” Flint murmured, looking up at him, eyes wide. His eyelashes were long and golden in the candlelight.

“What do you think? The dazzling sun and the distant moon,” Silver said. He traced his fingers over the tattoo on Flint’s own shoulder. “An oasis of light in the darkness.”

“Are you the second rate poet to my philosopher now?”

“Fuck off.”

Flint laughed softly. He leaned in and pressed his mouth to the design, barely even a kiss, hot breath ghosting over Silver’s skin, the scratch of his beard tickling.

Silver sank his hands into Flint’s hair again, one on either side of his head, stroking it through his fingers. He couldn’t look at the place where Flint’s lips met his skin; instead he let his gaze drift off into the darkness over the top of his head. He was drawn back, however, as Flint caught his wrists in his hands and pulled them one after another to his mouth, kissing the soft skin where his pulse was racing, excruciating in his gentleness.

Flint’s eyes were on his face, somehow bright in the dim candlelight and much too close. Silver leaned down to catch his lips again, pulling his hands free from Flint’s grasp and sliding them under his shirt. He shifted lower in his lap, pausing as he rubbed against Flint’s cock through his breeches. He was hard - they both were - and somehow it was a jarring shock to him. A grounding moment of reality. Flint’s mouth was slack, caught in a silent gasp, and Silver licked his bottom lip gently, almost instinctually.

Flint wrapped one hand around the side of Silver’s neck, fingers in his hair, tugging gently until Silver tilted his head and he could reach his throat with his mouth. He sucked the skin at the juncture of Silver’s neck and shoulder, nipping it with his teeth, but then he leaned back, spitting strands of hair from his lips.

“This mane is ridiculous,” he grumbled. “How can you even see where you’re going?”

“Don’t whine,” Silver said. “You’re lucky I didn’t hack at it with a knife before I left the inn. It crossed my mind.”

He pushed Flint away from him slightly, gathering his hair up in his hands and twisting it behind his head, winding it round and round into a bun and tucking the ends underneath and through the centre. All the while his arms were raised, Flint’s fingers wandered over his skin, trailing across his ribs, his nipples, his armpits, making him squirm. His nails were blunt, but the calluses on his hard working hands made Silver’s skin tingle and his muscles jump, and it was difficult to focus on the task at hand. But he managed, working through the twitches, and with some final prodding and poking he pulled his hands away and his hair stayed put, snug at the nape of his neck.

“There- _oh.”_ Silver inhaled sharply as he lowered his arms.

Flint had run his thumb down the front of Silver’s breeches, softly but with enough pressure to make Silver’s cock twitch. Silver grabbed his hand, twisting their fingers together, and with his other palm flat against Flint’s chest he pushed him onto his back again.

He didn’t say the words ‘slow down’, but he hoped Flint could read them on his face. He hadn’t planned for any of this, hadn’t really drawn up any lines he absolutely wouldn’t cross, but he thought this might be one of them. There were things still between them, time and tides and dead men, and whether or not Flint could feel them, to Silver they were ever present and an obstacle yet to be overcome. They loitered back in the shadows, watching him, waiting, expecting.

He rolled off Flint and onto his side, wriggling in close and hooking his leg over Flint’s thigh as he kissed him again. _Stay close, but hold back,_ he urged with gentle kisses, the barest touching of their lips.

“Please put your hands on me,” Flint whispered into his mouth, sucking on his bottom lip.

Silver slid his hands under Flint’s shirt obliging, wide palms stroking up his stomach, rucking the material up until Silver could feel the soft hairs on Flint’s belly tickling his own skin. Flint was warm, so warm. Hearth and home and everything Silver longed for, and yet.

Flint pushed Silver onto his back, latching onto his collar bone, sucking and biting, working his way along to the peak above his shoulder. 

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Flint murmured against his skin. “I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you too,” Silver breathed, and by god there was little truer in the entire world, but his eyes were focused on the dark ceiling as he said it.

“I thought about you every day,” Flint continued. “Even when I hated you. _Especially_ when I hated you. I never found a way to silence your voice in my head.”

Silver could feel the weight of Flint’s own loneliness, could see himself reflected in it, and the distorted echo frightened him. It was too heavy by far. He was the architect of a towering portion of it; enough of it to damn him. He was Flint’s gaoler; he was the liar who made a terrible choice; he was a liar still. He couldn’t breathe.

“Do you believe in fate?” Flint asked, beard scratching against Silver’s sternum. “I never did. But this...so much rage and loss, and now here you are, with nothing left to come between us.”

He kissed his way further down the Silver’s body, drinking him in like a famished man escaped from the doldrums, and Silver felt the panic within him bubble over. It was too much, too fast, and the staring eyes of the ghosts in the shadows were burning his skin, demanding he speak before Flint did what he was clearly planning on doing: taking him in communion and consummating a forgiveness that had been offered without a full confession.

“Flint,” Silver said, hands on Flint’s shoulders, trying to stop his progress.

“Call me James again. Please. Nobody ever calls me James anymore,” Flint said, mouth on Silver’s stomach.

As Flint’s fingers brushed the folded top of his breeches, Silver writhed and grabbed his hands.

“James. I have to tell you something else,” he blurted out. “Something important. I couldn’t-I should’ve said it before, but I...”

Flint looked up at him concerned. “What is it?” he said, voice unbearably gentle.

“He was there.” The words rushed out of Silver and seemed to hang suspended in the air for several agonising seconds.

“Who was where?” said Flint.

“ _He._ He was at the plantation. Thomas. But by the time I found out it was too late. He die- _wait, listen, please._ ”

Flint had reared up away from him as though burnt, sitting back on his heels and staring at Silver wide eyed. The enormity of his silence almost squeezed the breath out of Silver’s lungs, but he couldn’t stop speaking now.

“I sent a man there to find out, I tried, _I hoped,_ but it was too late, it was much too late, and-”

“What the fuck are you saying?” Flint cut across him, his chest heaving.

“He died there,” Silver breathed. “Years before.” His heart was pounding; he could feel his pulse in his throat. 

Flint scrambled to his feet, staggering away from the bed like a drunk about to vomit.

“Flint,” Silver said, reaching after him. “Please, I’m sorry, just-”

Flint whirled round at the brush of Silver’s fingers on his forearm, gripping Silver’s wrist like a vice.

“You put me there. You knew that and you put me there? And then you came here and you climbed back inside my head, _my bed._ ” Flint’s eyes were wild and for a moment Silver thought he might snap his wrist, or his neck.

“I…” Silver trailed off. He didn’t know what to say. What could he possibly say? “I wanted to tell you,” he whispered, “but I...everything was such a mess...the war...I couldn’t.”

 _“Stop. Talking,”_ Flint hissed, his nails digging into Silver’s skin. _“You are fucking poisonous.”_

And then he was gone, the bedroom door slamming behind him, leaving Silver’s wrist aching, his ears ringing, and his lips still tingling from the scratch of Flint’s beard.

Silver pressed his hands to his face, curling his fingers into his hair and pulling it from its makeshift binding, his nails digging into his scalp. Fuck. _Fucking fucking fuck_. Maybe he was the curse? He truly had an unparalleled ability to fuck any situation sideways and ruin every soft thing he touched; withering hope and trust and gentleness like a ravaging disease. And now what? If he followed Flint downstairs, likely as not he’d find a fist in his face or a knife at his throat and, tempting as the wilder, more dramatically inclined side of him found that prospect, he’d really rather not breathe his last in a pool of blood on Flint’s kitchen floor and be buried in a shallow, unmarked grave in the woods. But staying there in that bed, sitting among the still warm rumpled sheets that smelled of Flint, that had been bought with Thomas Hamilton’s money...it was obscene.

He slid out of the bed onto the floor, pulling a blanket with him, and tucked his crutch in close beside him. He felt like a trapped animal, cornered by his own stupidity and hubris. To think he could just walk in here, dragging a spectre of that size behind him, and allow himself to end up in Flint’s bed knowing it was a storm just waiting to break? _Christ._ This is what he did. What he had always done. Allowed himself to be swept along with the tide, thrilling at the pull of the water around him until the currents threatened to drag him under. And then. _Drowning men weren’t rational._

He shivered, and fished around in the gloom for his shirt. _Flint’s shirt._ Finding it on the floor nearby, he pulled it over his head, and wrapped his hands up in the too-long sleeves, twisting the material tightly between his fingers. The house was silent around him, and he pulled the blanket up over his shoulders trying to shut it out. Then, leaning back against the cold wall, his hands trembling slightly in his lap, he settled down to begin the long wait until dawn.

 

~*~*~*~


	3. but do so with all your heart

Silver heard shuffling downstairs and the sound of the front door closing shortly after the first grey light began creeping in through the bedroom window. Sometime in the night it had stopped raining, but he couldn’t have said when. He meant to wait a while before heading downstairs, in case Flint came back, but the bedroom was becoming so claustrophobic that he could only count three minutes, by the ticking of the grandfather clock, before he levered himself up from the floor and opened the door. One thing in his life that he was grateful for was that his sight was still sharp, and he made it down the gloomy staircase without incident, counting the steps as he went. Thirteen. Unlucky for some.

Downstairs he found the house silent and empty, as expected. A blanket lay clumsily folded over the rocking chair at the back of the room, and Silver assumed that was where Flint had spent the rest of the night. A cold flicker of shame ran up his spine. His clothes were still next to the fireplace and he made his way across the room and rubbed them between his fingers. Still damp, but not sodden. He peered out of the front window, looking for any sign of Flint before he shucked the borrowed shirt over his head and the breaches down over his hips and pulled his own things back on, shivering as they wicked the heat away from his skin. Flint’s clothes he folded carefully and lay on the rocking chair, neatening the blanket as he did.

There was no note on the table, or any indication of where Flint had gone, or when he planned to return, or whether he expected Silver to disappear without a trace or wait there to answer to him once he had had time to think. Not that Silver had been expecting Flint to take care of his nerves by leaving written instruction. But he felt trapped in a kind of limbo, faced with two choices, neither of which felt right. A cage entirely of his own making. He shrugged away that persistent deja vu.

The teacups from the night before were still sitting on the table unwashed. Silver sat down, running a finger over the patterns on the porcelain. What had looked twee and incongruous in a way that made his skin itch yesterday, made his heart ache today. They were fragile and domestic and Silver had sneered and misused them as he had misused every piece of soft generosity Flint had offered him.

He wondered where Flint had first got a taste for this particular sort of domesticity and the comfort it clearly offered, and in the depths of his memory he found the foggy image of Miranda Hamilton on the deck of the Walrus bound for Charlestown. He never had the opportunity to see her house in the interior of New Providence island, never saw the only place aside from the Walrus that Flint might have called home. But he imagined it would have looked similar to this house. He was presumptuous enough still to know that, subconsciously or not, Flint would have tried to recreate some of what he had there in this new place. Books and porcelain and linen, creaking stairs and homely smells and a familiarity you could trust with your eyes closed. Things which grounded you to one place, bound you up in sentimentality, and made it so much more difficult to run. Maybe that was the appeal, he considered, but the idea had always unsettled him down to his bones, even when he had tried on the face of a man who wanted it.

His skin prickled, his hair standing on end, and he turned to look around the room, half expecting to find eyes on him. Perhaps Miranda Hamilton, standing in judgement of him, leaning over his shoulder, with her neat dark hair, and her plain old dress, and those eyes that he remembered best of all. Knowing eyes. Had she looked at the Governor in Charlestown with those eyes? Is that what set alight the touch paper that burned the city to the ground? _He knew then_ , Silver thought. _The Governor knew he was dead and buried a stone’s throw away and he said nothing._ He wondered what clever reasoning that man had used to keep the truth hidden from them, what choices he had justified, what lies he had told. Silver felt sick.

He had never known what he wanted, not exactly, only that he _wanted,_ intensely and selfishly. There was some gaping hole in the middle of him, an oozing wound of tattered flesh that never healed. He had tried to fill it with so many things over the years - money, power, sex, and love, mostly - and he had made so many choices and justifications for taking what he thought he needed most. But it remained a stubborn void, an insatiable maw, and he thought everyone who got close could probably hear the rattle of the tarnished things he kept behind his hollow ribs. But he had rarely been one for extended self-pity, at least once upon a time. It required too much self-reflection and honesty. Running was easier, when no home comforts tied you down. So he would run.

He didn’t know when his ship would be leaving, he reasoned, and so he couldn’t stay any longer even if he wanted to. The sky was a clear and blissful blue. This time yesterday it might have been the thing he wanted most in the world. And yet now he almost wished for a return of the rain, for the black clouds to sweep in and hem him into this place for just a little longer, just long enough for...he didn’t know what. For something. For the barest sliver of hope.

The newspaper he had laid out the night before was dry, but the pages were crinkly and warped and grainy under his fingers. He folded them back together and pressed them flat against the table, smoothing his hands over the front page. His pencil was still in his coat pocket, and he used it to scrawl a short note to Flint in the top corner:

_‘Gone back to the inn. Don’t know how long until I sail again. I’m sorry.’_

He straightened up the room as best he could, trying to minimise the reminders that he had ever been there at all, and then he began the slow walk back to town.

 

~*~*~*~

 

One brief conversation with the ship’s captain later and Silver learnt that the storm had damaged the ship and repairs had to be made, but the day after next, weather permitting, they ought to be ready to sail again. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Perhaps both. He swiped another newspaper from a table in the bar on his way back to his room, but once he barred the door with a chair, kicked off his boot, tossed his scarf aside, and collapsed on his bed, he thought it might be easier to climb a mountain than to read a single page. His body ached, his eyes burned, and when he lay flat on his back he found that his limbs trembled in a way that would have been more than a little perturbing had he the energy to properly consider it. But he had the luxury of a real bed beneath him - one not paid for by a dead man - and so he curled himself into a tight ball, burrowed beneath the blanket with his coat still wrapped around him, and fell into a fitful sleep where just for a while the ugly mess of life could not reach him. If only his dreams would be kind.

That day and the next passed in a blur that seemed to simultaneously last a thousand years and no time at all. Silver hardly left his room, alternating between pacing the floorboards, no doubt pissing off whoever happened to be in the room below, and curling up in bed in various states of dress and undress as he fluctuated between freezing cold and far too hot. He hoped he wasn’t coming down with something. If he died in this bed and somebody happened to remember his conversation in the bar, his rapidly bloating corpse would likely be stripped of all valuables and stuffed in some frozen outhouse to await the extraction of money from Flint’s comfortable retirement fund to pay for his burial. One final expensive insult. Although, it would be rather fitting to diddle Flint out of money again on his way out of this ultimately fairly disappointing earthly plane. Or, more likely, nobody would have any fucking clue who he was or who might ever have cared about him enough to see him properly interred, so a pauper’s grave at the arse end of the world it would be. Then again, perhaps he was simply overcompensating for the cold with his layers and layers of clothes, and his incessant moving, rather than actually dying. He had a flair for the dramatic, even minus an audience.

Half way through the second day, when he had read the new newspaper three times and grown utterly exhausted with replaying memories in his head, Silver made a half-hearted attempt to have a wank just to pass the time, but the images of Flint and Madi that floated through his mind didn’t exactly put him in the mood he wanted. He had thought, given the unfortunate timing of his spectacular stupidity, that finishing himself off even a day and a half later might relieve some tension, but he was mistaken. He should’ve stolen one of Flint’s books. He needed the distraction and it wasn’t as though Flint could be any angrier with him. So even further wound up by his own hand, tired of sleep, and despising the newspaper, Silver resigned himself to wallowing in the mire of the things he had said and done, and to wondering just where exactly he had first fucked up so monumentally that there had been no salvaging the wreckage of his life. There were so many choice moments to choose from that he found it difficult to pin one down as The Fuck Up. Still, it was something to pass the time.

He would have to go a long way back, he thought, to truly have a hope of changing the course of events. Far back beyond the war, beyond the men, beyond his incapacitation. The decision to go to Charlestown. The decision to play a part for a little longer, to avoid suspicion, to get his gold. It looked from this vantage point in the cold and distant future like another moment on a precipice, though he hadn’t known it. Not consciously. He wondered how much the power he wielded over the men’s minds even then had seduced him beyond reason, so that really the choices he made were no choices at all, and he had lost a part of himself to the cause already, before he had bled for it.

His leg ached with the chill, right down to the toes he no longer possessed. He hated this feeling. Another ghost following him around, lest he forget. He thumped the end of his stump, reminding it of its boundaries, and winced at the dull tingling that was still the best approximation of sensation that the thick scar tissue could muster. He counted his remaining toes. Five. He counted things often, when he felt himself tumbling headfirst into the sorts of moments that echoed in his dreams. The sorts of things it was difficult to recognise as conjurations of his mind before he woke up panting and distressed. His leg was a frequent focus. Sometimes he would dream that he was running, until he remembered that he couldn’t, and then he would look down as his leg crumpled into blood and bone beneath him and the rushing upwards of the ground crashed him back to wakefulness. And so he took every waking opportunity to remind himself of the truth. Five toes, one foot, one calf. Quite the price. Far more than a pound of flesh.

However. Had he not gone to Charlestown, had he not paid that price, he would never have become Flint’s true partner, never have met Madi, never known what it was to be _someone_ to the sort of people who mattered. The lives he had lost and the life he had gained in their stead. Perhaps it wasn’t for any man to decide whether the measure of his life was worth what he had lost along the way, since it wasn’t within any man’s power to go back and change that course, no matter how fervently he might wish it, or how often he might dream. But he could still wonder and he could still wish and he could still hate that the scales tipped in favour of sentimentality, rather than reason. Though he might be back in the gutter now, he had touched the sun and the moon once, and they had loved him back. And while they had slipped far beyond his reach, what they had had was fixed in time and forever true.

Quite the fuck up, quite the price, but quite the prize.

 

~*~*~*~

 

The day of departure arrived clear and bitterly cold. Silver collected his things and left his room early, when the sun had barely cleared the horizon. Contrary to what some might have thought, once upon a time, he had grown adept again at moving quietly when needed. A strip of cloth wound around the bottom of his crutch helped to muffle the sounds of his movements somewhat, along with stuffing his boot into his pocket toe-first until he got outside. Those practised moves, along with what he had observed of the innkeeper’s morning schedule, allowed him to slip down the stairs and out of the building unseen. An unpaid bill was hardly the worst of his crimes; he wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.

He made his way down to the docks unhurriedly, a hollow pit in his stomach weighing him down. He glanced around when he arrived, looking for any sign of Flint, but he wasn’t there and from what he could see neither was his little boat. The air was cold on his skin, but there was no wind, so he settled on a low wall with a good view and waited for any sign of his ship’s captain.

An hour or so passed, judging by the obnoxiously loud church bells up the street, and he was beginning to sag where he sat, frozen to the wall. He clenched his toes, trying to get the blood flowing through his foot again. He definitely needed to head further south, and quickly. Italy maybe? Though he didn’t speak a word of Italian. He wondered where Marcus Aurelius had come from. Perhaps there was something in the water there that could offer him some humility and stoicism. Probably not, but it might be worth a try. He had no better plans.

He was so lost in thought, cobbling together an imagined view of Italy from some vague recollections of the Mediterranean, that he didn’t hear him approaching.

“When?”

Silver whirled around. Flint was standing a few feet away, looming over him, his face impassive as a stone.

“When what?” said Silver, wondering whether to stay sitting or stand up.

“When did he arrive there? When did he die there? And when did you know?” said Flint.

Silver swallowed heavily. Better to stay sitting. It wouldn’t help to look like he was squaring up against Flint, defensive and ready for a fight, but neither would it do him any good if his frozen foot gave out beneath him. Flint didn’t look as though he was in the mood to catch him before he went down arse over tit.

“I don’t know the answer to the first question,” he said honestly, “but he died about five years before I enquired, or so I was told. I knew...it was around the time of the Spanish raid.”

Flint’s eyes were locked on him, but they slid out of focus slightly as he considered what Silver had said. Reaching back through his memories, Silver assumed, trying to put events in order, and placing this new information amongst them.

”Why didn’t you tell me then?” he said. “What could possibly have motivated you to keep that from me?”

It was difficult to remember exactly, given how long ago it had all been. Time had a way of hollowing out memories so that all that remained were the images, the sensations, the feelings. The motivations and the clever reasonings seemed to be the first to fade into obscurity. However, Silver knew that would not be an adequate answer, and given the obsessive, nauseating occupation of his mind over the previous two days with little other than their shared history, he had already dredged up something that felt close to the truth.

”It was because of Madi, for the most part, I think,” he said, shoving his hands into his pockets and trying to suppress a shiver.

 _“You think?”_ Flint seemed thoroughly unimpressed with his answer.

Silver sighed. “It was a long time ago, Flint. Everything happened so fast. The Spanish raid, Woodes Rogers, the cache...I thought she was dead and then I knew that she wasn’t and there wasn’t room for anything else. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t see what good it would do. I didn’t see how it could help put out any of the fires that were raging. How it could do anything other than return you to that state of chaos into which you sank after the events of Charlestown. Do you remember how bad things got then? Do you have any concept of what it’s like to coexist with your rage? On top of everything else, I couldn’t risk having to manage that version of you too.”

“I have some idea of what it’s like to coexist with my rage,” spat Flint. “And you weren’t my fucking keeper.”

“Wasn’t I?” Silver said. He was leagues beyond holding back any truths now. What would be the point? Had he woken up that morning expecting to have this conversation then perhaps his answers would have been more schooled, but he hadn’t and they weren’t.

Flint’s cheek twitched, but he took a steadying breath and said, “Afterwards. Why didn’t you tell me afterwards, when you _were_ my keeper? _My gaoler._ ”

Silver closed his eyes. Flint’s gaoler. He didn’t want to hear it, but he wouldn’t dispute it. There were other names for what he had done. ‘Gaoler’ was charitable.

“Afterwards, when we were travelling there,” he said, “I suppose I felt sickened at the thought of locking you up with a ghost, but if you didn’t know then-”

”That wasn’t your decision to make.” Flint voice was rough. “You felt sickened, but you did it anyway?”

“Yes,” Silver said, gaze on Flint’s eyes unwavering. “A recurring theme of those days, I think. For the both of us. I know you know what it feels like to do things despite that sickness. To justify them in your mind, to choose to live with them, as though they were an unavoidable burden to have to bear.”

“Do not presume to climb back inside my head,” said Flint.

“Well, if you could show me the way out then I’d be much obliged, because it’s been ten fucking years and I can’t seem to escape you.” And there was the heart of the preceding days. Silver took a deep breath before he continued. “I’m sorry. If it’s worth anything at all, I am sorry. For that, for all of it. But I can’t promise you that if I had that time over again I would do any of it differently.”

”What the fuck does that mean? How is that an apology?” said Flint.

”I made the only choice that seemed closest to right or good in that moment. With the world on fire around me, with everything to lose, I had to decide. But I am sorry if it was the wrong decision, and I am sorry that it caused you pain. You weren’t the only one who suffered because of the choices I made. Please know that I wanted the opposite. If you believe nothing else then believe that. I just wanted to end the misery that I could, and I feared the truth that I held would only throw fuel on the fire, and it would rage out of my control.”

Flint kept staring at him, his mouth tight and his fingers moving in his pocket. Silver’s gaze was drawn to the movement. Was it just that old restless twitch again, or was he going to be gutted like a fish after all? Either way, he was fast growing tired of sitting in Flint’s towering shadow.

“Will you please sit down? You’re making me anxious,” he said.

“Good,” Flint replied.

Silver almost smiled. “We’ve been here before, Flint. More than once. I’ve said my piece, so if you’re going to kill me then I’d rather you just get it over with. My ship leaves soon, so you’d better make your mind up. Time and tide wait for no man, not even the infamous Captain Flint.”

“Do you really think you’re in any position to be making jokes?” said Flint.

“Old habits. You remember how fast I became the ship’s jester. And I made you smile the first time you wanted to kill me. Do you remember that? This is what we’ve always been, one way or another.”

Flint was very still, and Silver wondered whether he had finally had enough of his talking, but then he pulled his hands from his pockets empty and sat down on the wall next to him with a heavy sigh.

“You make it impossible to trust you,” Flint said quietly. “Every time.”

“I know,” said Silver.

“And stop fucking asking if I remember things. I’m not senile yet,” said Flint.

Silver snorted, but he controlled his smile when he saw the sideways look Flint threw at him. _Don’t get complacent, you are not forgiven._

“Do you know what took him in the end? For so long I believed it was his own hand, but...”

Flint sounded exhausted, and Silver felt a renewed wave of self-loathing wash over him at the tone of his voice; willing to smother his anger just in the hopes of hearing the slightest sliver of information about his lost love. And Silver was the custodian of those meager truths, though he had no right to them. He owed him those few things he alone still knew. Whatever was happening here, whatever this was, truths were all he had left to give.

“A sickness,” he said. “Something that swept through all of Georgia, Carolina, Spanish Florida, I think. That’s what was relayed to me.”

“It almost doesn’t seem possible,” Flint said, sounding as though he was speaking mostly to himself. “Something so mundane, so commonplace. Something that might have happened to anyone anywhere. But he wasn’t just anyone. He was the best man I ever knew. Far better than me. Far better than you.”

Silver kept his mouth firmly shut. Ruminations on the true capacity of any rich man for unambiguous moral virtue would absolutely not be welcome in this moment, and it was not the hill that he would choose to die on. Especially literally.

“You said to me once,” Flint began, frowning as he dredged up another distant memory, “you said what if his father had found some way to secret him away from England. Did you know then?”

Silver tried to recall the conversation. “I don’t think so. When I first heard about that place, before I knew anything for certain, that’s what I imagined. But it was the governor in Carolina who saw to the arrangements in Savannah.”

Flint turned to face him, eyes wide and burning. “Ashe? He arranged... _that lying fucking_...” Flint trailed off with a snarl.

“I presume then that he made no mention of it either, oblique or otherwise?” said Silver, and he knew as soon as he said it that it was a mistake.

“That is not esteemed company to be claiming,” Flint said, his voice brimming over with anger. “Aligning yourself with him in any regard is not a safe place to be.”

“Sorry,” Silver said, chastened, and then, gaze trained firmly on his boot, he added carefully, “I never did ask you what exactly happened to him. I just assumed you brought Charlestown down on his head, but...”

“I ran him through while he cowered like the pissant dog he was,” Flint said.

“Ah.” Silver nodded minutely.

Flint was twisting his hands together in his lap, his fingers red with the cold. Silver watched them turning over and over, saw the dry white calluses and the cracked skin borne of a lifetime at sea. He remembered how those rough fingers felt on his skin. Hard hands, skilled hands, violent hands, made gentle. The way they touched him as though he were an idol to be worshipped. A false idol.

“There’s always something else with you, isn’t there?” said Flint suddenly, breaking Silver from his stolen reverie. “Always something hidden away; some new poisonous revelation tucked under your skin. Are there more? Because this is your final chance to tell me.”

Silver controlled his breathing carefully. He hadn’t been thinking of this as a final conversation, somehow. Even having expected to never see Flint again, such was the feeling of being at his side. A natural inevitability. Who was presumptuous now? He could hear the grandfather clock ticking a mile away. He turned over every unsaid thing he could think of in his mind, wondered if any of them counted as poisonous revelations that Flint should know. Perhaps. But nothing that wasn’t his to keep.

“There’s nothing else like that,” he said.

“What does that mean?” said Flint, picking through his words and looking for cracks to pry apart.

Silver pulled his hands from his pockets and picked at a niggling hangnail on his thumb. “There’s nothing else that relates to you,” he said. “Nothing that isn’t a poison I’ve been carrying since long before we met.”

He could feel Flint looking at him, but he didn’t look up. He knew what Flint would be thinking. He was thinking it too. Those blissful days on the clifftop, the stark white sunlight stripping everything from between them, except those things which Silver could not name, could not even look at. Those things which hung around his neck, sitting between his shoulder blades, out of sight, out of reach, out of mind, but which sometimes made the back of his neck prickle if he remembered even for a second that they were there. His neck prickled now.

“There’s nothing else. I swear it,” he said, looking Flint in the eye.

Flint held his gaze, weighing and measuring him, scouring the depths of him, and then he nodded silently, satisfied.

Silver watched the gulls wheel overhead, their screaming conversations cutting through the quiet.

“Why have you circled these notices?” Flint said, and Silver frowned and turned to look at him as he drew the folded up, near-ruined newspaper from his coat pocket. The pages were more crinkled than he had left them; screwed up harshly and then smoothed out once again, he assumed.

“Which notices?” said Silver, feeling compelled towards evasiveness for reasons he couldn’t quite identify.

“These ones,” said Flint, holding the paper out in front of him and gesturing towards the faint scribblings that could only just be made out. “The ones describing runaway slaves. The ones offering rewards for their capture.”

Something about the way he said it put Silver’s back up. A question, just implied, about the depths to which his immoralities might run. It stung, and all the more for being so close to a fair accusation.

“What are you imagining?" he said. "Has your estimation of me really fallen that far?” 

Flint said nothing, the crease between his brows deepening.

Silver sighed, locking his evasiveness firmly away. It had no place here anymore. “Madi has agents throughout the colonies, and beyond, who intercede, where they can, to offer aid to people escaped from their bondage and to provide them with passage to New Providence,” he said. “I send her the papers partly so she might know who to expect in the coming months, who her agents ought to look out for, and the places where there is a need for her efforts to be extended. It’s just...idle reconnaissance, alongside my own stupid witterings.”

“I see.” Flint sounded taken aback, somehow.

Silver fought the urge to roll his eyes and shake his head. “I have done monstrous things, and I have done them to you, but I am not a monster,” he said.

“I know that. I know,” Flint said, and it sounded as though he was making the conscious choice to believe it again then and there. “In the letter Madi wrote to me, the letter she sent with my things, she said there was a treaty. I presume these endeavours are not within the scope of what was agreed to.”

“Not remotely,” said Silver.

Flint nodded slowly. “Good,” he said, and he held the paper out for Silver to take.

“I’m not sure this is in any fit state to survive a trip to the Caribbean,” said Silver, surveying the crisp, ragged pages. “And I haven’t got the money to send it any time soon anyway.”

Flint raised an eyebrow. “That reminds me, I paid your tab at the inn, since you didn’t see fit to do it yourself. I know you and your big mouth. You’ll have said something at some point that linked us, and I don’t particularly want to be blacklisted throughout the town thanks to you. I have to sell my fish to these people. And it’s hardly wise to piss off the only purveyor of flea-free beds within fifteen miles. You won’t find anywhere better to sleep.”

“Why? Are you going to ask me to stay?” said Silver, voice deliberately light.

“No.” Flint’s voice was decisive.

Silver wasn’t foolish enough that he had actually hoped, but his stomach dropped a little anyway.

“I’m going to ask you to come back,” Flint continued.

“Oh.” That was unexpected. “When?” said Silver.

“When you’ve gone and spoken to Madi. When you’ve told her what happened here. When you’ve stopped running away from every truth you don’t like,” said Flint.

“I don’t know if she’ll even want to see me,” said Silver.

“There’s only one way to find out,” said Flint. 

“It’ll take months,” Silver said, fully aware that Flint knew that already.

“Yes. And perhaps I’ll have found a way to forgive you by then,” said Flint, and oh, that bright burst of hope.

Silver picked at the fraying inner lining of his coat pocket. “You don’t have to, you know. Forgive me. You don’t have to,” he said.

Flint huffed quietly. “I’m aware of that. You have no say in the matter.”

“Alright. You’ll stay here?” Silver said, looking at Flint sideways, watching his face carefully.

“Yes,” he said.

“Will you swear it?”

Flint turned his head and stared at him. Silver had no right to ask it, and yet.

“It’s like you said,” Silver said, omitting the words ‘the other night’. “The fear that you’ll just blow away in the wind, like a dream, like a nightmare, like you were never really here at all. If I come back and you’re gone-“

“I’m not going anywhere. I promise,” said Flint.

Silver felt hot words rushing up through him, heavy on his tongue, just daring him to speak them, but he held them back. It wasn’t the right time or place. They would be more likely to do damage than help to heal. But they ran circles round and round his mind regardless, as he carefully swallowed them back.

_'I love you, you know. We both did such cruel things but it was all for love.'_

Next time, perhaps.

“Why?” he said instead, risking a different avenue of frankness. “Why isn’t this the straw that broke the camel’s back, after everything else? Why would you be willing to forgive this too?”

Flint stayed silent for a while, weighing his words, and when he spoke Silver could hear two full days worth of anguish and reasoning and philosophising pressed into a few short breaths.

“Because I want to,” Flint said. “Because I’m tired and I’m old. Because I’ve forgiven far worse. Because I’ve _done_ far worse. Because I forgave you years ago for what you did to me, and for so many other lies that you told, as you forgave all those lies of mine. And whatever else you might’ve done, what happened to him was not your fault. You were practically still a damn child when I lost him. The world doesn’t allow us second chances at happiness all that often. I’ve been denied too many to throw this one away so quickly, just because it won’t be as easy as I tricked myself into believing it could be. As if anything in our lives ever came easily before. Everything I have has been hard-won, but its value is not diminished for it. Quite the opposite. Why should this not be the same? If fate saw fit to bring us back together, then I accept it. Wholeheartedly.”

Silver was lost for words. A rare thing. But there was an understanding of that too, he thought, in Flint’s subsequent silence.

“Will you promise me something else?” Silver said, after a moment, when he had gathered his thoughts a little.

“What’s that?” said Flint.

“That while I’m gone you’ll take a respite from channelling the stoicism of dead Romans. It’s fucking unnerving.”

Flint blinked at him, surprised, then he snorted and flashed his teeth. “Don’t push it. I need that. Make no mistake, I am still fucking angry with you,” he said, and Silver knew he meant it.

“I know. Everyone always is, until they love me. Then they’re just angry about that too,” Silver said, risking another glance sideways as the word ‘love’ escaped his lips. “Quite frankly, I sympathise.”

Flint shook his head, looking out at the far horizon. “When does your ship leave?” he said.

“No idea. The captain’s a moron. Has no idea what he’s doing. I suspect a mutiny isn’t far away. You don’t fancy swimming out there and taking it by force, do you? For old times’ sake?” Silver said with a sly smile.

Flint laughed, and the sound was so beautiful to Silver’s ears that he might have wept.

“Do you know how cold that water is? I’ll pass, thank you. My bones are too old for those sorts of escapades these days.”

Silver smiled wider, stretching his back and groaning as it cracked. “Yeah, mine too. Should’ve picked a comfier wall,” he grumbled.

“How long have you been sitting here?” said Flint.

“Hour and some,” said Silver. “It’s fine. I enjoy the air of insouciance it provides to a long wait when you don’t have a book to hand.”

“Always with the affectations,” said Flint, amused.

“How else does one construct a personality?” said Silver. “Can I write to you while I’m gone?”

“I suppose,” said Flint. “If you have that much to say. But don't expect me to write back.”

“I did write to you once before, you know. I wrote it all down in a letter, every bit of it, and then I dropped it into the sea,” Silver said, fingers opening in front of him in an unconscious mime.

Flint raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t get it. Neptune’s a notoriously unreliable courier.”

Silver laughed, his chest blooming with warmth despite the chill on his skin.

“Send me newspapers instead of letters,” said Flint. “I prefer notes in margins and reading between the lines.”

“Alright,” said Silver.

Flint rubbed his hands together, trying to warm them up. Silver looked at him out of the corner of his eye; really looked at him. His cheeks were flushed red with the cold, and the low winter sun made his hair shine bright, copper and silver. He was radiant.

“You’ll catch a cold,” Silver said. “You can go somewhere warmer, if you want to.”

“I could,” said Flint. “But I’ll wait a while longer with you, I think. I’m not ready to say goodbye just yet.”

 

~*~*~*~


End file.
